Financial Decision Support

Success Stories

One in three women delivers via cesarean in the U.S., and more than 90 percent of them have repeat operations in subsequent deliveries. Despite numerous evidence-based guidelines and established best practices for labor and delivery, clinical care varies widely for many practices. Labor and delivery care varied at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, causing the organization to look for ways to standardize care.
To better understand variations in care, and opportunities to reduce its cost, the labor and delivery care transformation team at Thibodaux Regional used the Health Catalyst Labor and Delivery Advanced Application as well as the Financial Management Explorer application, which integrates data from billing and costing, and creates snapshots of current financial metrics.
Informing and educating providers with provider-specific data in conjunction with redesigned workflow, standardized supplies, and new, standardized protocols enabled the labor and delivery care transformation team at Thibodaux Regional to experience cost savings and improved outcomes, including:

At MultiCare Health System, the processes for denial management were not as effective as they could be, negatively impacting net patient revenue and financial performance through millions of dollars in adjustments. While only two-thirds of denials are recoverable, nearly 90 percent are preventable. MultiCare looked at improving denial management as an opportunity to improve appropriate revenue capture for services provided. Through targeted improvement efforts that included standardized workflows and increased data visibility, the health system is improving the root cause of denials.
Results:

Allina Health, an integrated delivery system throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin, has long understood the value of clinical documentation improvement (CDI), and its growing importance in recent years. With the implementation of ICD-10, the specificity needed for accurate coding has increased, and reimbursement shifts have occurred as well, creating sizeable payment disparity for some clinical conditions. Leaders at Allina wanted to understand where their CDI program would have the greatest return on investment. However, data from the EHR was not sufficient to inform their strategy. CDI specialists still lacked the ability to perform a comprehensive assessment of the accuracy of clinical documentation, and were unable to confidently target improvement efforts in areas that would generate the greatest return on investment. To take a more data-driven approach, team members leveraged the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform, including their Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications to develop a CDI analytics application. With the application, the team identified opportunities and thoroughly vetted them, before collaborating with physicians and service line leaders to educate providers on documentation improvements.
They achieved the following results:

By the age of 60, more than one-third of women in the United States have had a hysterectomy. Healthcare systems across the country are recognizing that a women’s health service line offers a pathway to improving care and decreasing cost for these patients. Having accurate activity-based costing information is necessary to uncover opportunities for clinical practice improvement and cost reduction.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the decision to organize Women’s Health as a service line across the entire health system. UPMC fortified this approach with strong and collaborative leadership, an enterprise data warehouse, and an activity-based cost management system. The results:

20 percent reduction in inpatient length of stay for hysterectomies (over a three-year time period)
34 percent reduction in open hysterectomies
28.3 percent reduction in 30-day readmissions for hysterectomies

These results were obtained during a time when this clinical service saw a 25 percent improvement in its contribution margin.

Between 2007 and 2014, U.S. healthcare costs per capita increased by almost 25 percent. The way in which health systems are typically organized, managed, and budgeted (as departments and units within separate hospitals) works against them when they attempt to improve population health and decrease costs. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a large health system with more than 20 hospitals and 500 clinics, was keenly aware of this challenge as it embarked on population health and value-based care initiatives that spanned the entire organization.
The health system determined that it needed to break down the virtual walls between care centers and standardize service lines across the enterprise. By extension, this organizational change mandated the need for activity-based costing in healthcare that would deliver the insight necessary to run a service line effectively. UPMC organized six service lines within the health system, each spearheaded by clinical, operational, and financial leadership. Each service line uses the health system’s innovative, data-driven activity-based costing methodology to understand the true cost of care.
Notable, measurable results of UPMC’s service lines and activity-based costing methodology to date include:

$42 million of cost reduction opportunities (approximately 2 percent of targeted service line cost)
$5 million in supplies savings
Transparency toward identification of contribution margin variation for specific procedures
Up to 97 percent improvement in time to access information

A hospital’s core mission is to provide the best care possible. To continue to do so, however, hospitals must be paid promptly. Discharged not final billed (DNFB) cases—where bills remain incomplete due to coding or documentation gaps—represent an ongoing challenge for hospitals around the country.
Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, like other hospitals, faces a myriad of new government regulations that have made hospital bill collection efforts more onerous. Its leaders recognized their inadequate manual DNFB process left hospital staff overburdened and put at risk the necessary cash flow to best serve patients.
The hospital automated and streamlined this process to relieve the burden on physicians, provide an integrated view of data, optimize visibility and workflow, and reduce the need to “downcode” reimbursements due to missing documentation. The hospital leveraged analytics to provide actionable feedback to continuously improve the process.
Thibodaux has already achieved significant improvements to cash flow and operational efficiency:

In an era of steadily declining operating margins, hospitals are seeking ways to increase their profitability. Learn how one hospital system integrated financial and operational data in near real-time, giving their leaders visibility into how their decisions are impacting the bottom line. Leadership is now making more informed decisions and they are addressing problems as they arise. Budgets are consistently being managed close to target and variances for each cost center are readily explained with drill-down capabilities into the general ledger. A significant manual effort associated with over 1,000 cost center spreadsheets has been eliminated and the organization has saved $12 million in labor savings.

Federal and state funding reductions, along with increased competition, are the latest profitability challenges facing healthcare organizations. Texas Children’s recently faced this challenge head-on when projections indicated they would fall $50 million short of what was needed to build capital reserves and to maintain their bond rating. To improve financial performance and prepare for the future, the leadership team launched a system-wide performance improvement project called “Delivering on the Vision” (DOTV). DOTV would involve increasing accessibility for patients as well as driving healthcare operation savings. Texas Children’s goal, of increasing operating margins over 18 months by achieving $60 million in savings, has been surpassed — realizing $74 million in cost savings to date.

To run efficiently and use the money they earn to improve the health of a community, healthcare institutions must manage their revenue cycle well. Crystal Run Healthcare, one of the fastest growing multi-specialty group practices in the country, anda physician-led accountable care organization (ACO), is committed to ensuring that the dollars it earns serve its patient population and are not wasted on inefficient processes. To that end, Crystal Run recognized that to minimize manual reporting and make quick, well-informed decisions related to revenue cycle management, they needed to employ analytics. With the implementation of an advanced analytics application, on top of their EDW platform, this ACO now accesses data up to 99% more quickly, has reduced staff time to identify variance root causes by 97%, and is actively identifying financial management improvement opportunities.

The demand on hospital coders continues to rise – and even more so with the ICD-10 rollout. At the same time, health systems want to make sure professional billing charge captures are accurate. Learn how North Memorial Health System leveraged their hospital enterprise data warehouse – and the Health Catalyst Professional Billing Module – to: a) increase the number of provider notes with sufficient clinical data for billing, b) increase their monthly net income and c) improve their hospital coding staff productivity by 25%.